The statistic is stunning: Moms in Texas are five times more likely to die during childbirth than in California.

Over the past year, new national attention has been focused on maternal deaths in the U.S, which have increased over the past two decades at a time when the rest of the world has seen its numbers fall. The problem is especially pronounced in Texas, where one recent analysis found moms dying at a rate higher than anywhere in the industrialized world.

The death rate, which has doubled to 36 deaths per 100,000 births since 2011, doesn't make sense "in the absence of war, natural disaster or severe economic upheaval," a state task force wrote last year.

Much has been written about what's driving the increase: Are GOP cuts to women's health programs like Planned Parenthood driving the increase? (No, according to some.) Other possible factors — the opioid epidemic, increasing obesity rates and Texas' highest-in-the nation uninsured rate — can't fully explain the spike.

Her reporting quickly led her to the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, a decade-old Stanford initiative that gives hospitals tools and guidelines to prevent maternal deaths:

"The organization, which runs as a collective and is mainly funded by the California Healthcare Foundation, California Department of Public Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was imagined in a Los Angeles airport hotel meeting room in 2006, a time when the state's maternal mortality rates had recently doubled.

"A group of concerned doctors, nurses, midwives, and hospital administrators, including CMQCC medical director Elliott Main, started a maternal mortality review board to pore over each death in detail and identify its root causes. Pretty quickly, hemorrhage and preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced severe high blood pressure) floated to the top of the list as the two most common — and preventable — causes of death."

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With detailed maternal data — sorely lacking in most of the country — the collective was able to hone in on what actually was driving maternal deaths. One big one: Too many women were having unnecessary C-sections, leading to risky complications in subsequent births, a problem that was addressed by simply making doctors aware of their cesarean rates and getting them to compete with each other.

Another problem they found: Hospitals were well equipped to take swift life-saving action when a baby went into a distress, but less so when a mother did.

Through the collective, participating hospitals have been equipped with "toolkits," which are "evidence-based, step-by-step recipes — downloadable for free — on how teams of health care providers in hospitals can best prepare for and manage the sometimes deadly complications that arise with childbirth."

The collective found that, often when mothers began to hemorrhage, hospitals weren't ready with the tools needed to treat them immediately. So they created the "hemorrhage cart," modeled after the code blue cart that has become standard at hospitals across the country to quickly treat patients that go into cardiac arrest.

Another improvement was teaching hospitals how to better measure blood loss during pregnancy; that way, medical teams know more quickly when they need to take action.

Is it possible that by reducing C-section rates and giving hospitals better tools and guidelines, that Texas also could reverse its trend?

Boston University maternal health expert Eugene Declercq told Belluz the main difference between Texas and California is that California had the will to take on the problem.

"The argument we make internationally is that [a high maternal death rate] is often a reflection of how the society views women," Declercq said. "In other countries, we worry about the culture — women are not particularly valued, so they don't set up systems to care for them at all. I think we have a similar problem in the US."

Mike Hixenbaugh is an investigative reporter focused on exposing fraud and abuse in health care. Previously, he was a reporter at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where his work on the military and veterans affairs was co-published with ProPublica, NBC News and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. Mike graduated from the University of Akron in 2007, before going to work for small newspapers in Ohio and then North Carolina.